Overview

In this chapter, you'll learn about the different ways you can connect LabVIEW VIs to the Internet, your network, and other programs. We'll see how you can easily use LabVIEW's built-in web server to publish front panels to the Web. You'll become familiar with network variables and how they can be used to share data between LabVIEW VIs across the network. XML, ActiveX, .NET connectivity (Windows), AppleEvents, and pipes provide you with a way to have LabVIEW interact with external programs. We'll see where LabVIEW fits in the big picture of the "enterprise" data management and databases. And, finally, we will take a quick look at the report generation VIs.

Goals

• Know how to use the LabVIEW web server to publish VIs to the Web

• Learn how to send emails from LabVIEW

• Use shared variables to share data

• Find out how LabVIEW works with XML schema and XML data

• Discover the .NET, ActiveX, AppleEvents, and pipes for communicating with other applications

• Become familiar with LabVIEW's lower-level networking capabilities: TCP and UDP VIs

• Understand the role of databases

• Examine LabVIEW's capabilities to generate reports